With the hardest working pupils and with the chair throwers, sustained, consistent relationships work.
The trust's chief executive, Lee Elliot Major, told me last week: "We think it has to be about convincing good teachers to teach and stay in the areas with the highest concentrations of white working pupils, plus investment in programmes to engage pupils and parents outside the school to improve cultural capital and attitudes to education".
And if, in order for this policy to work, pupils are going to have to be taught these languages by people who haven't actually learned them themselves, then that's all just part of the fun, isn't it?
What we're really talking about here is not exactly failure, which does always hurt a little, but resilience, and robustness: taking the risk, then learning from it when it doesn't work; pupils becoming "expert learners, not experts".
She has been a teacher for 25 years and has been working with pupil and parent ambassadors for more than three years.
It's well known that white working class pupils, boys in particular, are not making the same progress that pupils from most ethnic minority groups are making.
But she stands by her remarks about the importance of rigorous qualifications for working class pupils.
Nothing made this clearer to me than working with pupils who were looked after or in need of protection.
For teachers working with pupils who struggle with extended writing tasks, this detailed guide from HumansNotRobots offers lots of helpful tips.
It was the sense that the Labour party should be offering something better to working class pupils from deprived communities than a fast track into the army.
